In late March 2023, a well-funded artificial intelligence startup hosted what it said was the first ever AI film festival at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in San Francisco. The startup, called Runway, is best known for co-creating Stable Diffusion…The short films were mostly demonstrations of technology. Well-constructed narratives took a backseat. Some were surreal, and in at least one instance intentionally macabre. But the last film shown made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It felt as though the filmmaker had deliberately misunderstood the assignment, eschewing video for still images. Called Expanded Childhood (homepage), the AI “film” was a slideshow of photos with a barely audible echo of narration.
Director Sam Lawton, a 21-year-old film student from Nebraska, later told me he used OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 to alter the images [outpainting]. He assembled a series of photos from his childhood, fed them to the AI tool, and gave it various commands to expand the images: to fill in the edges with more cows, or trees; to insert people into the frame who hadn’t really been there; to reimagine what the kitchen looked like. Toss another puppy into the bathtub—why not? Lawton showed the AI-generated images to his father, recorded his befuddled reactions, and inserted the audio into the film.
“No, that’s not our house. Wow—wait a minute. That’s our house. Something’s wrong. I don’t know what that is. Do I just not remember it?” Lawton’s father can be heard saying.
Where do real memories end and generative AI begin?
…As for his short film, he says the reception to it has been “interesting”, in that it has resonated with people much more than he thought it would. He’d thought the AI-distorted faces, the obvious fakeness of a few of the stills, compounded with the fact that it was rooted in his own childhood, would create a barrier to people connecting with the film. “From what I’ve been told repeatedly, though, the feeling of nostalgia, combined with the uncanny valley, has leaked through into the viewer’s own experience”, he says.
Lawton tells me he has found the process of being able to see more context around his foundational memories to be therapeutic, even when the AI-generated memory wasn’t entirely true.